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Improving Financial Decisionmaking Related to Retirement

The decrease in defined benefit pension plans use, coupled with an increase in the life span, is shaping how individuals plan financially for their retirement. CFED researchers investigate how households save for retirement, invest their savings, and spend down their assets in retirement.

Building Financial Health amongst the Economically Vulnerable

Bringing Together Government Policymakers, Academia, and Industry

The RAND Behavioral Finance Forum is an annual conference and webinar series for federal government, academic, and industry leaders on behavioral finance topics such as retirement security, consumer financial protection, and financial advice.

This article represents the first U.S. study employing exclusively household-level longitudinal data spanning the Great Recession to estimate the response of household spending to negative wealth shocks induced by the sharp declines in house prices.

This dissertation explores the college major decision-making process, both for initial and subsequent major choices, and analyzes the associations between major choice behaviors and student outcomes such as time to degree and probability of graduation.

Most U.S. seniors follow nonstandard retirement pathways. Seniors with better cognitive ability were more likely to follow nonstandard retirement pathways: In a studied sample, 59.1 percent of those with high cognitive ability had a job after age 65.

This report — part of a series examining critical security challenges in 2040 — uses survey data from a nationally representative sample of adults to examine perceptions of economic and national security and compare attitudes and opinions of millennials with those of previous generations. It concludes by making inferences about potential millennial concerns about security in the year 2040.

This paper explores the utility of two prominent psychological variables - cognitive ability and personality - as predictors, while also substantially expanding the detail with which retirement pathways can be characterized.

Our results suggest that educational programs that engage the user emotionally or physically and involve vicarious experience rather than text-based or passive educational programs are key for making gains in both financial literacy and confidence in financial knowledge.

Researcher Spotlight

Adjunct Economist

Angela Hung is an adjunct economist at the RAND Corporation and previously directed its Center for Financial and Economic Decision Making. She has more than 19 years of experience in survey, focus group, and experiment design to study individual decision making. Hung's work focuses on how people…

Senior Economist

Katherine Carman is an economist at the RAND Corporation, director of RAND's Behavioral Finance Forum, and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her research focuses on behavioral economics, health economics, and public economics. Carman is particularly interested in how individuals'…

Kata Mihaly is a senior economist and associate director of the Economics, Sociology and Statistics Department at the RAND Corporation. She is also an affiliate faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Mihaly leads a number of studies that evaluate education programs using rigorous…

Economist

Philip Armour (he/his) is an economist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. As an empirical labor economist, he relies on variation in labor market trends and public policy to uncover how individuals perceive eligibility for and generosity of government…

Featured Event

The RAND Behavioral Finance Forum brings together academic, financial, and government leaders to share cutting-edge behavioral research in financial decisionmaking. The 2017 annual conference was on Tuesday, October 24, 2017, at The Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C.

Blog Posts

Saving early for retirement is critical, but it's also important to stay on track during job changes. Younger workers tend to change jobs often, and if they cash out of their plans with each position, that can affect their long-term savings.

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